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OTTAWA—Day one for new
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau
featured three questions to the Prime Minister, two controversial, Conservative attack videos and a 25-minute encounter with a huge swarm of Parliament Hill reporters.

The buzz created by Trudeau’s candidacy for Liberal leader over the past six months, much of it occurring outside the Ottawa bubble, made its way into the corridors of Parliament Hill on his first day after winning the job on Sunday.

Though Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his cabinet ministers extended congratulations to the new Liberal leader, the Conservative party welcomed him with two mocking attacks on YouTube, accompanied by an
anti-Trudeau website
and a Facebook page as well.

Trudeau shrugged off the attacks as predictable, but the Canadian Liver Foundation issued a condemnation, since the Conservatives used footage from a Trudeau appearance at one of the charity’s events in 2011.

Justin Trudeau says the footage of him taking off his shirt in new Conservative attack ads is from a cancer charity fundraiser. The ads were released shortly after he was elected the leader of the Liberal party.(The Canadian Press)

In that
ad
aired Monday morning, the Conservatives took aim at Trudeau’s experience, suggesting the 41-year-old was in “over his head.” Against a background of carnival-like music, Trudeau is depicted removing his shirt at the “What a Girl Wants” fundraiser in 2011, where he raised nearly $2,000 for the foundation.

Another
video
talks up Harper’s economic record while poking fun at Trudeau’s past jobs as a camp counsellor, rafting instructor and drama teacher, adding, “and now he thinks he can run Canada’s economy.”

Trudeau
took
the leadership of the third-place party in a landslide on Sunday.

He had predicted in his acceptance speech on Sunday night that the Conservatives would waste little time in going negative — as they have with previous Liberal leaders—and on Monday Trudeau predicted that the tactic would soon wear thin with Canadians.

“I am quite confident that what I’ve heard from Canadians across this country about people being tired of negativity, of bullying, of cynicism means that the Conservatives are going to discover that the one thing they know how to do really well is no longer working for them,” Trudeau told reporters at a massive, post-question-period scrum. “I look forward to having robust discussions on ideas, on values, on a vision for this country that will contrast well.”

Inside the Commons, Trudeau chose to make his first questions about higher prices for middle-class consumer goods because of recent tariff changes in the Conservatives’ budget.

“The Prime Minister can couch this in any terms he likes, but the fact is when middle-class Canadians go to a store to buy a tricycle, school supplies or a little red wagon for their kids, they will pay more because of a tax in this government’s budget,” Trudeau said.

Trudeau was preparing for his first day in the House of Commons Monday as Liberal leader and the mid-afternoon question period. Both Mulcair and Harper were expected to be present as well.

Harper replied that the Conservatives had introduced many measures to make taxation fairer and the Liberals had opposed them.

Though Trudeau now has the job his father held for 16 years, his first day in the Commons featured small gestures to his mother’s side of the family. He wore the Sinclair tartan (surname of his mother and his British Columbia grandfather and former politician James Sinclair) and his mother, Margaret, was in the public galleries. As well, former interim leader Bob Rae presented Trudeau with a pen that once belonged to former Liberal prime minister Wilfrid Laurier.

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